he path of light that
came  out  at the door. He began to  run  forward in the darkness. Behind Ed
Griffith's saloon old Jerry Bird the town drunkard lay asleep on the ground.
The runner stumbled over the sprawling legs. He laughed brokenly.
     George  Willard had set forth  upon an adventure. All day he  had  been
trying to make up his  mind to go through with the adventure  and now he was
acting. In the  office of the Winesburg Eagle he had  been sitting since six
o'clock trying to think.
     There had been no  decision. He had just jumped to  his  feet,  hurried
past Will  Henderson who  was reading proof in the printshop  and started to
run along the alleyway.
     Through  street after  street went George  Willard, avoiding the people
who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he  passed a street lamp
he  pulled  his hat down over his face. He did  not dare think. In  his mind
there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid  the adventure
on which he had  set out  would be  spoiled,  that he would lose courage and
turn back.
     George Willard  found  Louise Trunnion in  the  kitchen of her father's
house. She was  washing dishes  by  the light  of a kerosene lamp. There she
stood behind  the  screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the back of
the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried to control the
shaking  of  his body.  Only  a narrow potato  patch separated  him from the
adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt sure enough of himself to call
to her. "Louise! Oh, Louise!" he called. The  cry stuck  in  his throat. His
voice became a hoarse whisper.
     Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth
in her hand. "How do  you know I want to go out with you," she said sulkily.
"What makes you so sure?"
     George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness
with the fence between them. "You go on  along,"  she said. "Pa's in  there.
I'll come along. You wait by Williams' barn."
     The  young  newspaper  reporter  had  received  a  letter  from  Louise
Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The
letter  was  brief.  "I'm  yours  if you want me," it  said.  He thought  it
annoying that in the darkness  by  the  fence she had  pretended  there  was
nothing between  them.  "She has a nerve!  Well,  gracious sakes,  she has a
nerve,"  he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of  vacant
lots where corn grew. The corn was shoulder high and had been  planted right
down to the sidewalk.
     When Louise Trunnion came out  of the front door of her house she still
wore the gingham dress in  which  she had been washing dishes. There was  no
hat on  her head.  The  boy could see her standing with  the doorknob in her
hand talking  to someone within,  no doubt to old Jake Trunnion, her father.
Old Jake was half deaf and she shouted. The door closed  and everything  was
dark and  silent  in  the  little side street. George Willard trembled  more
violently than ever.
     In the shadows by Williams' barn George and Louise stood, not daring to
talk. She was  not particularly comely and there was a  black smudge on  the
side of  her nose.  George thought she  must have  rubbed her  nose with her
finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.
     The young man began to laugh nervously. "It's warm," he said. He wanted
to touch her with his hand. "I'm not  very bold," he thought. Just to  touch
the folds  of the soiled gingham  dress would, he  decided,  be an exquisite
pleasure. She began  to  quibble. "You  think you're better than I am. Don't
tell me, I guess I know," she said drawing closer to him.
     A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that
had lurked in the girl's eyes when they had  met on the  streets and thought
of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered  tales concerning
her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male,
bold and aggressive. In  his heart there was no  sympathy for her. "Ah, come
on,  it'll  be all right. There won't  be anyone know anything. How can they
know?" he urged.
     They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the  cracks of
which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks  were missing and the sidewalk was
rough  and  irregular.  He took  hold  of her hand that  was also rough  and
thought it delightfully small. "I can't go far," she  said and her voice was
quiet, unperturbed.
     They  crossed a bridge that  ran over a tiny  stream and passed another
vacant lot in which corn grew. The street ended. In the path at  the side of
the road  they were  compelled to walk one behind the other.  Will Overton's
berry field  lay beside  the road and  there was a pile of boards. "Will  is
going to build a shed to store berry  crates here," said George and they sat
down upon the boards.
     When George Willard got back into Main  Street it  was past ten o'clock
and had begun to rain. Three times he walked up and down the  length of Main
Street. Sylvester West's Drug Store was still open and he went in and bought
a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was
pleased. For five  minutes the two stood in the shelter  of the store awning
and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had wanted  more than anything
else  to talk to some man.  Around a corner toward the New Willard  House he
went whistling softly.
     On the sidewalk at the side of Winney's Dry Goods Store where there was
a high board fence covered  with circus pictures, he  stopped whistling  and
stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening  as though for a
voice  calling his name. Then  again he  laughed  nervously. "She hasn't got
anything on me. Nobody knows," he muttered doggedly and went on his way.

     GODLINESS
     A Tale in Four Parts
     THERE  WERE ALWAYS three or four old people  sitting on the front porch
of the house or puttering about the garden of the Bentley farm. Three of the
old  people were women  and sisters to Jesse. They were  a  colorless,  soft
voiced  lot. Then  there was a  silent old man with thin white hair who  was
Jesse's uncle.
     The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outercovering over a framework
of logs. It was  in reality not one  house but a  cluster  of houses  joined
together  in  a  rather haphazard  manner.  Inside, the  place was  full  of
surprises. One went  up steps  from the living room into the dining room and
there were always steps to be ascended or descended in passing from one room
to another. At  meal  times the place was like a beehive.  At one moment all
was  quiet, then doors began to open, feet clattered  on stairs, a murmur of
soft voices arose and people appeared from a dozen obscure corners.
     Besides the  old people,  already mentioned, many others  lived in  the
Bentley house. There were  four hired men,  a woman named Aunt Callie Beebe,
who  was  in charge  of  the housekeeping,  a  dull-witted girl  named Eliza
Stoughton,  who  made beds and  helped with the milking, a boy who worked in
the stables, and Jesse Bentley himself, the owner and overlord of it all.
     By the time the American Civil War had been over for twenty years, that
part of Northern Ohio where the  Bentley farms lay had begun to emerge  from
pioneer life. Jesse then owned machinery  for harvesting grain. He had built
modern  barns and most  of his land  was  drained  with  carefully laid tile
drain, but in order to understand the man we  will have to  go  back  to  an
earlier day.
     The Bentley family had  been  in Northern Ohio  for several generations
before Jesse's time. They came from New York State and took up land when the
country was new and land could be had  at a low price. For a long time they,
in common with all the other Middle Western people, were very poor. The land
they had settled  upon was  heavily wooded  and covered with fallen logs and
underbrush. After the long hard labor of clearing these away and cutting the
timber,  there were still the stumps to be reckoned  with. Plows run through
the fields  caught on hidden roots, stones lay  all about, on the low places
water gathered, and the young corn turned yellow, sickened and died.
     When Jesse Bentley's father and brothers  had come into their ownership
of the place, much of the harder part of the work of clearing had been done,
but they clung to old traditions and worked like driven animals.  They lived
as  practically all of  the farming people of the time lived. In the  spring
and  through most  of  the winter  the  highways  leading  into  the town of
Winesburg were a sea  of mud. The four  young men of the family  worked hard
all day in the fields, they ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night
slept like tired beasts on beds of straw. Into  their lives came little that
was not coarse  and  brutal  and  outwardly they  were themselves coarse and
brutal.  On  Saturday  afternoons  they  hitched  a  team  of  horses  to  a
three-seated wagon and went off to town. In town they stood about the stoves
in the stores talking to other  farmers or to  the  store keepers. They were
dressed in  overalls and in  the winter  wore heavy coats  that were flecked
with mud. Their hands as  they stretched them out  to the heat of the stoves
were cracked and red. It was  difficult for them to talk and so they for the
most  part  kept  silent. When they had bought meat, flour, sugar, and salt,
they  went into one  of the Winesburg saloons  and  drank  beer.  Under  the
influence of drink  the  naturally  strong  lusts  of  their  natures,  kept
suppressed by  the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released.  A
kind of crude and animallike poetic fervor  took  possession of them. On the
road  home  they stood  up on  the wagon  seats  and shouted  at  the stars.
Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke  forth
into  songs. Once  Enoch  Bentley,  the  older one of  the boys,  struck his
father, old Tom Bentley, with the butt of a teamster's whip, and the old man
seemed likely to die. For days Enoch lay hid in the straw in the loft of the
stable ready to flee if the result of his momentary passion turned out to be
murder. He was kept alive with food brought by his mother, who also kept him
informed of the injured man's condition. When all turned out well he emerged
from his hiding place and went back to the work of  clearing land  as though
nothing had happened.
     The Civil War brought a sharp turn to the  fortunes of the Bentleys and
was responsible  for the rise  of the  youngest  son, Jesse. Enoch,  Edward,
Harry, and Will Bentley all enlisted and before the long war ended they were
all  killed. For a time after  they went away to the South, old Tom tried to
run the place, but he was not successful. When the last of the four had been
killed he sent word to Jesse that he would have to come home.
     Then  the mother,  who had not been well for a year, died suddenly, and
the father  became altogether discouraged. He talked of selling the farm and
moving into  town. All day he went about shaking his head and muttering. The
work in the  fields was neglected and weeds  grew high in the  corn. Old Tim
hired men but he did not use them intelligently. When  they had gone away to
the fields in the morning he wandered into the woods and  sat down on a log.
Sometimes he forgot to come home at night and one of the daughters had to go
in search of him.
     When  Jesse Bentley came home  to the farm and began  to take charge of
things he was a slight, sensitive-looking man  of twenty-two. At eighteen he
had left home to go to school to become a scholar and eventually to become a
minister of the Presbyterian Church. All  through  his boyhood he  had  been
what  in our country was called an  "odd sheep" and  had not got on with his
brothers. Of all the family  only his mother had  understood him and she was
now dead. When he came  home to take charge  of the farm, that  had  at that
time grown to more than six hundred acres, everyone  on  the farms about and
in  the nearby town of  Winesburg smiled at the idea of his trying to handle
the work that had been done by his four strong brothers.
     There was indeed good cause to smile. By the standards of his day Jesse
did  not look like a man at all. He was  small and very slender and womanish
of body and, true  to the  traditions  of young ministers, wore a long black
coat and a narrow black string tie. The neighbors were amused  when they saw
him, after the years away, and they were even more amused when  they saw the
woman he had married in the city.
     As  a matter of fact, Jesse's wife did soon  go under. That was perhaps
Jesse's fault. A farm in Northern Ohio in the hard years after the Civil War
was no place for a delicate woman, and Katherine Bentley was delicate. Jesse
was  hard with  her as he was  with everybody about him  in those days.  She
tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her
go on without interference. She helped to do the milking and did part of the
housework; she made the beds for the men and prepared their food. For a year
she worked every day from sunrise  until late at night and then after giving
birth to a child she died.
     As for Jesse Bentley--although he was a delicately built man  there was
something  within him  that  could  not easily be killed. He had brown curly
hair and grey eyes that were at times hard and direct, at times wavering and
uncertain. Not  only was he slender but  he was also  short of  stature. His
mouth was like  the mouth  of a sensitive and very  determined child.  Jesse
Bentley was a fanatic. He was  a man born out of his time and place and  for
this he  suffered  and  made others suffer. Never did he succeed in  getting
what he wanted out of fife and he did not know what he wanted. Within a very
short time after he came home to the Bentley farm  he  made everyone there a
little afraid of him, and his wife, who should have been close to him as his
mother had been, was afraid also. At the  end of two weeks after his coming,
old Tom  Bentley made over to  him the  entire ownership  of the  place  and
retired into the background.  Everyone retired into the background. In spite
of his youth and inexperience, Jesse had the trick of mastering the souls of
his people. He was so in earnest in everything he did  and said that  no one
understood him. He made  everyone on the farm  work as they had never worked
before and  yet there was no joy in the work. If things went well they  went
well  for Jesse and  never  for the people who  were his dependents.  Like a
thousand other strong men  who have come into the  world here  in America in
these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could  master others but he
could not master himself. The running  of the farm as it had never  been run
before was easy for him. When he came home  from Cleveland where he had been
in school,  he shut  himself off from all of his people  and  began to  make
plans. He thought about the farm night and day and that made him successful.
Other men  on  the farms  about him worked  too  hard and were too fired  to
think, but to think of the farm and to be everlastingly making plans for its
success  was  a  relief  to  Jesse. It partially satisfied  something in his
passionate nature. Immediately after he came home he had a wing built on  to
the old house and in a large room facing the west he had windows that looked
into the barnyard  and other windows that  looked off across  the fields. By
the window he sat  down  to think.  Hour after hour and day after day he sat
and looked  over the  land  and  thought  out  his new  place  in  life. The
passionate burning thing in his nature  flamed up and his eyes  became hard.
He wanted to make the farm produce as no farm in his state had ever produced
before and  then  he wanted something else.  It  was the  indefinable hunger
within that made  his eyes  waver and  that kept  him  always  more and more
silent  before people. He would have given much to achieve peace and  in him
was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.
     All over his body Jesse  Bentley  was  alive.  In  his  small frame was
gathered the  force  of a  long  line  of  strong men.  He  had always  been
extraordinarily alive when he was a small boy on the farm  and later when he
was a young man  in school. In the school  he had studied and thought of God
and the Bible with  his whole mind and heart. As time passed and he grew  to
know people better,  he began to  think of  himself as an extraordinary man,
one set  apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing
of great importance, and as he looked about at his  fellow men  and saw  how
like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also
such a clod. Although in his absorption in himself and in his own destiny he
was blind to the fact that his young wife  was  doing a strong woman's  work
even after she had become large with child and that she  was killing herself
in his service, he did not  intend to be unkind to her. When his father, who
was old and twisted  with toil, made over to him the  ownership of  the farm
and seemed content to creep away to a corner and wait for death, he shrugged
his shoulders and dismissed the old man from his mind.
     In the room by  the window overlooking the  land  that had come down to
him sat Jesse thinking of his own affairs.  In the stables he could hear the
tramping of his horses and the restless movement  of his cattle. Away in the
fields  he could see other cattle wandering over green  hills. The voices of
men, his men who worked for him, came in to him through the window. From the
milkhouse there was the steady  thump, thump of a churn being manipulated by
the half-witted  girl, Eliza Stoughton. Jesse's mind went back to the men of
Old Testament days who had also owned lands and herds. He remembered how God
had come down out of the skies and talked to  these men and he wanted God to
notice and  to talk to him also.  A kind of  feverish boyish eagerness to in
some  way achieve in his own life the flavor of  significance that  had hung
over these men took possession of him. Being a prayerful man he spoke of the
matter aloud to God and the sound of his  own words strengthened and fed his
eagerness.
     "I  am  a new kind of man  come  into possession  of  these fields," he
declared. "Look upon me, O God, and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all
the men who have gone  before me here! O  God, create in me  another  Jesse,
like that one of  old, to rule  over men and  to be  the father of sons  who
shall  be rulers!" Jesse grew excited as he talked aloud and  jumping to his
feet walked up and down in  the room. In fancy  he saw himself living in old
times and among old  peoples.  The  land  that lay stretched out  before him
became of vast significance, a place peopled by his fancy with a new race of
men sprung from himself. It seemed to him that in  his day as in those other
and  older  days, kingdoms might be created  and  new impulses given to  the
lives  of men  by  the power of  God  speaking  through a chosen servant. He
longed to  be such a servant. "It  is God's work  I have come to the land to
do,"  he declared in a loud voice  and his  short figure straightened and he
thought that something like a halo of Godly approval hung over him.
     It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men  and women of a later
day  to understand Jesse Bentley. In the last  fifty years a vast change has
taken  place in the  lives of  our  people. A revolution has  in fact  taken
place. The coming  of industrialism, attended by all the  roar and rattle of
affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new  voices that have come among us
from overseas, the going  and  coming of  trains, the growth  of cities, the
building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past
farmhouses, and  now  in these later days the coming of  the automobiles has
worked a tremendous change in the lives and in  the habits of thought of our
people of  Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be
in  the hurry  of our  times, are in every household, magazines circulate by
the millions of  copies,  newspapers  are  everywhere.  In our day  a farmer
standing  by the stove in the  store in his village  has  his mind filled to
overflowing with the words of other men. The  newspapers and  the  magazines
have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a
kind of  beautiful childlike  innocence is  gone forever.  The farmer by the
stove is brother to the men of  the cities, and if you listen you  will find
him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.
     In Jesse Bentley's  time  and  in the  country  districts of  the whole
Middle West in  the years after the Civil War it was not so. Men labored too
hard and were too  tired  to read. In them  was no desire for words  printed
upon paper. As  they worked in  the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took
possession of them. They believed in God and in God's power to control their
lives. In the little Protestant  churches they gathered on Sunday to hear of
God  and  his  works.  The churches  were  the  center  of  the  social  and
intellectual  life of the times. The figure  of God was big in the hearts of
men.
     And so, having been  born an imaginative child and having within him  a
great intellectual eagerness, Jesse Bentley had turned wholeheartedly toward
God. When the war took his brothers  away, he saw  the hand  of God in that.
When his father became ill and could no  longer attend to the running of the
farm, he took that also  as a sign from God. In the city, when the word came
to him, he walked about at  night through the streets thinking of the matter
and when he had come home and had got  the work on the  farm well under way,
he went again at night  to walk through  the forests and  over the low hills
and to think of God.
     As he walked the importance of his own figure in  some divine plan grew
in his  mind.  He grew avaricious and was impatient  that the farm contained
only  six  hundred acres.  Kneeling  in  a fence corner at the edge  of some
meadow, he sent his voice abroad into the silence  and looking up he saw the
stars shining down at him.
     One evening, some months  after his father's death, and when  his  wife
Katherine  was expecting at any moment to be laid abed of  childbirth, Jesse
left his house and went for a long  walk. The Bentley farm was situated in a
tiny valley  watered by Wine Creek, and Jesse walked along the banks of  the
stream to the end  of  his  own  land  and  on through  the  fields  of  his
neighbors.  As he walked the valley broadened and then narrowed again. Great
open  stretches  of field  and wood lay before him. The moon  came  out from
behind clouds, and, climbing a low hill, he sat down to think.
     Jesse  thought  that as the true  servant of God the  entire stretch of
country through which he had walked should have come into his possession. He
thought of his dead brothers and blamed them that they had not worked harder
and achieved more. Before him in the moonlight the tiny stream ran down over
stones, and he began to think of the men  of old times who like himself  had
owned flocks and lands.
     A fantastic impulse, half  fear, half  greediness,  took possession  of
Jesse  Bentley.  He remembered  how  in the  old  Bible story the  Lord  had
appeared  to  that other Jesse and told him to send his son  David  to where
Saul and the men  of  Israel were  fighting the Philistines in the Valley of
Elah. Into Jesse's mind came the conviction that all of the Ohio farmers who
owned land in the valley of Wine Creek were Philistines and enemies  of God.
"Suppose," he  whispered to himself, "there should come from among  them one
who, like Goliath the Philistine of Gath,  could defeat me and take  from me
my possessions." In fancy he  felt the sickening  dread that he thought must
have lain heavy on the  heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to
his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His
voice carried far over the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to
me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon
me. Send me a son to be called David who shall  help me to pluck at last all
of these lands out  of the hands of the Philistines and  turn  them  to  Thy
service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth."

     II
     DAVID HARDY OF Winesburg, Ohio, was the  grandson of Jesse Bentley, the
owner of Bentley  farms. When he was  twelve years  old he  went to the  old
Bentley place  to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the  girl who came  into
the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that
he be given a son, had grown to  womanhood on the farm and had married young
John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not
live happily  together and everyone agreed that she was to blame.  She was a
small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been
inclined to  fits  of  temper and  when  not  angry she was often morose and
silent.  In  Winesburg it  was said that she drank. Her husband, the banker,
who  was a careful,  shrewd man, tried hard to make her happy. When he began
to  make money he  bought  for her  a large  brick  house on  Elm  Street in
Winesburg  and  he was the first man in that  town to keep a  manservant  to
drive his wife's carriage.
     But Louise could not be made happy.  She flew into  half insane fits of
temper  during  which   she  was  sometimes  silent,  sometimes  noisy   and
quarrelsome.  She swore and cried out in her anger. She got a knife from the
kitchen and threatened her husband's life. Once she deliberately set fire to
the house, and often she hid herself away for days in her own room and would
see  no one. Her life, lived as  a half recluse, gave rise to all  sorts  of
stories  concerning her.  It was  said that she took drugs and that  she hid
herself  away from people because she was often  so  under the  influence of
drink  that  her  condition  could  not be  concealed.  Sometimes on  summer
afternoons she  came out of the  house and got into her carriage. Dismissing
the driver  she took the reins in her own hands and drove  off at  top speed
through the streets. If a pedestrian got in her way she drove straight ahead
and the frightened citizen  had to escape as best he could. To the people of
the  town  it seemed  as though she wanted  to run  them down. When she  had
driven  through  several streets,  tearing  around  corners and beating  the
horses with the whip, she  drove off into  the country. On the country roads
after she had gotten out of sight of the houses she let the horses slow down
to  a walk  and her  wild,  reckless mood passed. She  became thoughtful and
muttered words. Sometimes  tears came into her  eyes. And then when she came
back into  town she again drove furiously through the quiet streets. But for
the influence of  her husband and  the respect he inspired in people's minds
she would have been arrested more than once by the town marshal.
     Young David Hardy grew up in the house with this  woman and as can well
be imagined there  was not much  joy in his childhood. He was too young then
to have opinions of his own about people, but at times  it was difficult for
him not to have  very definite opinions  about the woman who was his mother.
David was always a quiet, orderly boy and for a long time was thought by the
people of Winesburg to be something of a dullard. His eyes were brown and as
a child he had a habit  of looking at things and people  a long time without
appearing  to see what he was looking at. When he heard his mother spoken of
harshly or when he overheard her berating his  father, he was frightened and
ran  away  to  hide.  Sometimes he could  not find a  hiding place and  that
confused him. Turning his face toward a tree or if he was indoors toward the
wall, he closed his eyes and tried not to think of anything.  He had a habit
of talking aloud  to himself, and early in life a  spirit of  quiet  sadness
often took possession of him.
     On the  occasions  when David  went to  visit  his  grandfather  on the
Bentley farm, he was altogether contented and happy. Often he wished that he
would never have to go back  to town and once when he had come home from the
farm after a long visit, something happened that had a lasting effect on his
mind.
     David had come back into town with one of the hired men. The man was in
a hurry to  go about his  own affairs and  left the boy at  the head  of the
street in which  the Hardy house stood. It  was early dusk of a fall evening
and  the sky was overcast with clouds. Something happened to David. He could
not bear to go into the house where  his mother and father lived, and  on an
impulse he decided to run away from home. He intended to go back to the farm
and  to his grandfather, but lost his way and for hours he wandered  weeping
and frightened on country roads. It started to rain and lightning flashed in
the sky. The boy's  imagination was excited and he fancied that he could see
and hear  strange things in the  darkness. Into his mind came the conviction
that he was walking and  running in some terrible void where no one had ever
been before. The  darkness about him seemed limitless. The sound of the wind
blowing in trees was terrifying. When a team  of horses approached along the
road in which he  walked he was  frightened and  climbed  a fence. Through a
field he ran until he came into another road and getting upon his knees felt
of the soft ground with his fingers.  But for the figure of his grandfather,
whom he was afraid he would never find in the darkness, he thought the world
must be  altogether empty. When his cries  were heard  by a  farmer  who was
walking home from town and he was brought back to his father's house, he was
so tired and excited that he did not know what was happening to him.
     By chance David's father knew that he had disappeared. On the street he
had met the farm hand from the Bentley place and knew of his son's return to
town. When the boy did not come home an alarm was set up and John Hardy with
several men of  the town went to search  the country. The report  that David
had been kidnapped ran about through the  streets of Winesburg. When he came
home there were no lights in the house, but his mother appeared and clutched
him  eagerly in her  arms. David  thought she  had  suddenly  become another
woman. He could not  believe that  so delightful a thing had  happened. With
her own hands Louise  Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food.
She would not let him go to bed but, when he had put on his  nightgown, blew
out the lights and sat down in a chair to hold him in her arms.  For an hour
the woman  sat in  the darkness and held  her  boy. All  the  time  she kept
talking in a low voice. David could not understand  what had so changed her.
Her habitually dissatisfied  face had become, he thought, the most  peaceful
and  lovely thing he had ever seen. When he began to weep she held  him more
and more  tightly. On and on  went her voice. It was  not harsh or shrill as
when  she talked  to  her husband,  but  was  like  rain  falling on  trees.
Presently men began coming to the door to report that he had not been found,
but she made him hide and be silent until she had sent them away. He thought
it must be a game his mother and the men  of the  town were playing with him
and laughed joyously. Into  his mind came the thought  that his having  been
lost and frightened in the darkness was an altogether unimportant matter. He
thought  that  he  would have  been  willing  to  go through  the  frightful
experience a thousand  times to be sure  of  finding at the  end of the long
black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become.
     During the  last years of young  David's  boyhood he saw his mother but
seldom and she  became for  him  just a woman with whom he  had once  lived.
Still he could not get  her  figure out  of his mind and as he grew older it
became more  definite. When he  was twelve  years old he went to the Bentley
farm to live. Old Jesse came into town  and fairly demanded that he be given
charge of the boy. The old man was excited  and determined on having his own
way. He talked to John Hardy in the office of the Winesburg Savings Bank and
then the  two men went to the house  on Elm Street to talk with Louise. They
both expected her to make trouble  but were mistaken. She was very quiet and
when Jesse  had explained his  mission and had gone on at  some length about
the advantages to come through having the boy out of doors and  in the quiet
atmosphere of the old farmhouse, she nodded her head  in approval. "It is an
atmosphere not corrupted by  my  presence," she said sharply. Her  shoulders
shook and she seemed about to fly into a fit of temper. "It is a place for a
man  child, although  it  was never a place for me," she went on. "You never
wanted me  there and of course the air of your house did me no  good. It was
like poison in my blood but it will be different with him."
     Louise turned and went out of the room, leaving the two  men  to sit in
embarrassed silence. As very often happened she later stayed in her room for
days. Even when the boy's clothes were packed  and he was taken away she did
not  appear. The loss of  her  son made a  sharp break  in her  life and she
seemed less inclined to quarrel with her husband. John Hardy thought it  had
all turned out very well indeed.
     And  so young David went to  live  in the Bentley farmhouse with Jesse.
Two  of  the  old farmer's sisters were alive and still  lived in the house.
They were afraid of  Jesse  and rarely spoke when  he was about. One  of the
women who had been noted for her flaming red hair when she was younger was a
born mother and became the boy's caretaker. Every night when he had  gone to
bed she went into his  room and sat  on the floor until he fell asleep. When
he became drowsy she became bold and  whispered things that he later thought
he must have dreamed.
     Her soft low voice called him endearing names and he dreamed  that  his
mother had  come to  him and that she had  changed so that she was always as
she had been that time after he ran away. He also grew bold and reaching out
his  hand stroked  the  face of  the  woman  on  the  floor so that she  was
ecstatically happy.  Everyone in the old  house became  happy after the  boy
went  there. The  hard insistent thing in  Jesse Bentley that  had  kept the
people  in  the  house silent and timid and that had never been dispelled by
the presence of the girl Louise was apparently swept  away by the coming  of
the boy. It was as though God had relented and sent a son to the man.
     The man who had proclaimed himself the only true servant of God in  all
the valley of  Wine Creek,  and  who had  wanted  God to send him  a sign of
approval by  way of a son out of the womb of Katherine,  began to think that
at  last his prayers  had been  answered. Although  he was at that time only
fiftyfive years  old he looked seventy  and was worn out  with much thinking
and  scheming.  The effort he had made to  extend his land holdings had been
successful  and  there  were few farms in the valley that  did not belong to
him, but until David came he was a bitterly disappointed man.
     There were two influences at work in Jesse Bentley and all his life his
mind had been  a battleground  for these influences. First there was the old
thing  in him. He wanted to be a  man of God and a  leader among men of God.
His walking in the fields and through  the forests at night  had brought him
close to nature and there were forces in the passionately religious man that
ran out to  the  forces  in nature. The disappointment that had come  to him
when a daughter and not a son had been born to Katherine had fallen upon him
like a blow struck by some  unseen hand  and the blow had  somewhat softened
his egotism.  He  still believed that God might at any moment  make  himself
manifest out of the winds or the  clouds, but  he  no  longer demanded  such
recognition. Instead  he prayed for it. Sometimes he was altogether doubtful
and thought God had deserted  the world. He  regretted the fate that had not
let  him live  in a simpler and sweeter time  when  at the beckoning of some
strange cloud in the sky men left their lands and houses and went forth into
the wilderness  to  create new races. While he worked night and day  to make
his farms  more productive and to extend his holdings of land,  he regretted
that he  could not  use his own  restless energy in the building of temples,
the slaying of unbelievers and  in general in the  work of  glorifying God's
name on earth.
     That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he hungered for something
else. He had grown into maturity in America in the years after the Civil War
and  he,  like all men of his time, had been touched by the  deep influences
that were at work in the country during those years when modem industrialism
was being born.  He  began to  buy machines that would permit  him to do the
work of the farms while employing fewer men and he sometimes thought that if
he were  a  younger  man he  would  give  up  farming altogether and start a
factory in Winesburg for the making of machinery.  Jesse formed the habit of
reading  newspapers and  magazines. He invented a machine  for the making of
fence out of  wire. Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times and
places that he had always cultivated in his own mind was strange and foreign
to  the  thing that was growing up  in the minds of others. The beginning of
the most materialistic age  in the history of the world, when  wars would be
fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only  pay attention
to  moral standards, when the will to power would replace  the will to serve
and  beauty  would  be well-nigh forgotten in the  terrible headlong rush of
mankind  toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse
the man  of God as  it was to  the men about him.  The greedy  thing in  him
wanted to make money faster than it could be made  by tilling the land. More
than once  he went into  Winesburg to talk  with  his son-in-law  John Hardy
about it. "You are a banker and you will have chances I  never had," he said
and his eyes shone. "I  am thinking about it  all  the time.  Big things are
going to be done in the country and there will be more money to be made than
I  ever dreamed of. You  get into  it. I  wish I  were younger  and had your
chance." Jesse Bentley walked  up  and down in the bank office and grew more
and more  excited  as he talked.  At one  time  in  his  life  he  had  been
threatened  with paralysis and his  left side remained somewhat weakened. As
he talked his left eyelid twitched. Later  when  he drove back home and when
night  came  on and  the stars came  out  it  was harder to get back the old
feeling of a  close and  personal God who lived  in the sky overhead and who
might at  any moment  reach out his hand, touch  him  on  the shoulder,  and
appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the
things  read in newspapers and magazines,  on  fortunes to  be  made  almost
without effort by shrewd men who bought and sold. For him the  coming of the
boy David did much to bring back with  renewed  force the  old faith and  it
seemed to him that God had at last looked with favor upon him.
     As for the boy on the farm,  life began to reveal  itself  to him  in a
thousand  new and  delightful ways. The  kindly attitude  of  all about  him
expanded his quiet  nature and he lost  the half timid, hesitating manner he
had always had with  his people. At night when he went  to bed after a  long
day of adventures in the stables, in the  fields, or driving about from farm
to farm with his grandfather, he wanted to embrace everyone in the house. If
Sherley Bentley, the woman who came  each night to  sit on the floor by  his
bedside, did not  appear at  once,  he  went  to  the head of the stairs and
shouted, his young voice ringing through the narrow halls where for so  long
there had been a tradition of silence. In the morning when he  awoke and lay
still in bed, the sounds that came in to  him through the windows filled him
with  delight.  He  thought  with  a shudder  of  the  life in the house  in
Winesburg and of his mother's